20 is for you. 20 is for growth. 20 is for the pursuit of a tomorrow that is better than today. 20 is for options. 20 is for passion and knowledge and enjoyment.

It is not for continuous compromise. It is not a time to say this is the guy that I gotta make it with, because this is the guy that I have. And no matter what compromises, no matter what I don’t like, no matter what he does, I have to put up with it, because he’s my man.

20 is for firing dudes when they don’t act right.

20 is for figuring out what you like in certain men. 20 is for finding what kind of men are out there and which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to discard.

It’s not for picking up other people’s clothes, it’s not for sticking it out when you’re not enjoying it anymore. 20 is opportunity to move onward, upward, forward. Get a large life so that even if a dude doesn’t end up in it, you still enjoy it.

20 is for creating all of that potential, not just compromising your way into the corner of a closet somewhere, wondering what the heck happened? You don’t have any children, you’re beautiful. You’re working, working at a gas station. Nothing wrong with it. But at your time off, don’t be looking to spend time with him. Go look to spend time with some books and your brain, to get a new degree. So that you could put the gas station in your rear view mirror as you step forward into some other kind of existence, that won’t include him!”

I know these things seem unrelated but I don’t believe they are. They, too, feel like intractable problems but I don’t believe that either.

•A man climbs into his car with his estranged wife and their children and drives them all into a lake.

•An eight-year-old boy is found hanging in his closet after being bullied.

•A man returns to his former workplace and starts firing at will.

•A teen girl kills her girlfriend and then herself in the school courtyard when she learns their relationship is over.

•A husband beats his wife to death and she becomes one of the approximately 1,800 women in the U.S. who die every year in the quiet, constant killing that stems from domestic violence.

•A man walks into a public place and starts shooting. This act, once thought the sole dominion of the mentally ill and ideological terrorists, having become a part of the public consciousness, is a growing choice of the distraught.

• A powerful authority figure is alone in a room with a young man and gropes him.

These things appear far-flung and unrelated. After all, mass shootings are individual bursts of horror we can’t anticipate. Domestic violence is a private thing that we don’t see until the worst has already happened. Bullying is just how things go, a rite of passage as old as time. Sexual harassment and assault are the hallmark of a perverted few. They certainly have no common cause, no less a common solution.

Or do they?

I believe there is a shared thread that, if pulled, will unravel this tapestry of destructive behavior. These behaviors are, at their core, emotional outbursts or self-involved acts protected by cultural norms. Power, control, lack of empathy, low self-esteem, unhealthy gender norms: they are the Root Causes that underlie all of these things.

You put someone who suffers from a sense of powerlessness in the life a person with low self-esteem, you get controlling and abusive behavior. You tell a man obsessed with control that his wife is leaving and the odds of him killing her go way up. Put a young man or woman alone in a room with a powerful person who lacks empathy and you get unwanted sexual advances. Find someone who’s angry, isolated and feeling feeble, expose him to the idea of killing en mass as a way to regain his power and you get … well, too many examples to list.

We are suffering from individual, yet continual, emotional catastrophes. We’re watching what happens when people become undone by their lack of power or a damaged sense of self. We’re seeing the effects of a society estranged from one another lobbing ever-escalating emotional tirades at each other on-line. All the while domestic violence continues to flourish in homes of those who struggle with issues of power and control.

Though it is almost impossible to spot the subtle red flags of these individual affective acts right before they happen we can address their root causes in a way that makes them less likely to occur.

If we change the way we deal with how we feel – if we re-evaluate and address cultural norms related to power and control – if we actively address our eroding sense of empathy and respect for others we can uproot the causes of emotional upheavals that inspire both abuse and lethal outbursts.

I know, it sounds like a herculean task but we have faced and cleared such hurdles before. It occurs when we, as a society, decide we are going to change what we teach the next generation. There was a time when nobody wore seat belts. Now everybody does because of a conscious, targeted effort to make that happen. The same goes for smoking. We decided, as a whole, to target a generation of young people to change habitual behavior and we succeeded.

We need to do that in an effort to address this emotional tsunami as well.

BLOOM365’s vision is safe and healthy relationships for all. It seeks to address the root causes of abuse and violence early and with an entire generation. BLOOM365 partners with K-12 schools and community based youth organizations to give young people the knowledge, skills and confidence to prevent abusive behaviors. And, through peer to peer mobilization, we activate young people to create an environment in which empathy, respect, kindness, consent, equality and peace are socially accepted norms.

We enter schools and deliver a seven-dose program over the course of seven consecutive school days in which we walk them through the signs of healthy and unhealthy relationships. We encourage them to challenge social norms that allow such behaviors to thrive. Then we leave with a Bloom Crew in place to re-inforce the new ideas we foster.

BLOOM365 works. Its methodology has been studied and determined effective. Bloom365 is not only important because of the groundwork it lays for healthy relationships moving forward; it intervenes in real time for those children who are currently suffering abuse or, equally important, showing signs of becoming an abusive person.

At every – not some – but every school we’ve been in we’ve run into teens in abusive relationships. Sometimes we are approached by victims who didn’t realize that what was happening to them was wrong. “Now I know,” one young lady said, “that my boyfriend should not be going through my closet telling me what I can and cannot wear.” Another said, “My boyfriend won’t let me have any friends and he won’t let me go anywhere without him. He said it was because he loved me so much. Now I see that’s not what it is.”

BLOOM365 doesn’t just help victims it also identifies potential perpetrators. One young man stood up during the program and said, “You know that empathy thing you’re talking about? Well, I don’t have any of that.” He’s a young man with whom we worked to bring him into the fold. Another said he was going to kill myself, the guy that did that thing to him and everybody he told who didn’t believe him. He, too, was encircled and cared for.

BLOOM365 is trying to affect cultural norms. We are trying to make the ongoing, conscious creation of an emotionally able, empathetic society the standard. It should be something we all engage in as a part of basic education.

Is this a quick and easy answer? Will it stem the tide tomorrow? Are the long-term results of our efforts easily quantifiable? The answer to these questions is a resounding no. The absence of an easy fix, however, should not prompt us to simply shrug our shoulders and walk away.

Tomorrow’s casualty count, the next wave of #MeToo hashtags and the extent of our children’s exposure to domestic violence all depend on what we do today. Our success won’t be obvious but you can see the process at work. Who knows what that boy with the list may have done had we not caught him in time? It’s just a story that did not happen. All of our victories will look like that.

It is a daunting but doable task that will only work if we all get on board. We should pursue this as if our lives depend upon it, because, if you think about it, one day, they might.

More from JudgeLynn

Books

My Mother's Rules" is a humorous, easy to follow self-help guide to managing your emotional life.

Using lessons learned on the bench along with humorous anecdotes from her own 30 year marriage, Judge Lynn Toler wrote "Making Marriage Work" as a logical and simple guide to bringing back the practicality lost in relationships over the years.

About

Judge Lynn Toler became the host of the longest running television court program, "Divorce Court" in 2006. Prior to that, Judge Lynn Toler graduated from Harvard University and The University of Pennsylvania Law School. She began practicing law in Cleveland in 1984. In 1993, at the age of 33, she was elected judge of The Cleveland Heights Municipal Court. Judge Toler volunteered actively in her community creating innovative programs for young offenders such as Woman Talk, a program designed to intensively mentor young, at-risk girls.

Toler also headed the Cleveland Heights Coordinated Community Response to Violence against Women, a countywide initiative for the coordination of community resources to assist women who are victims of violence. She was also active as an advisory board member for Templum House, a battered women's shelter. As a result of her work in the area of domestic violence in 2002, she was awarded The Humanitarian of the Year Award from The Cleveland Domestic Violence Center.

Judge Toler's dedication to ending domestic violence continues. Currently, she is on the Board of GoPurple.org, a non-profit organization that addresses the issue of domestic violence through education. GoPurple.Org sends educators into classrooms teaching students about healthy relationships, signs of potentially abusive relationships, and ways to help both themselves and others who are in abusive situations.

Judge Toler has served as an adjunct professor at Ursuline College, where she created and taught courses on Civil Rights Law, and Women and the Law. She was also a frequent instructor for the Ohio Judicial College, where she helped create and taught continuing judicial education course for other judges.

Judge Toler is the author of three books including her most recent "Making Marriage Work: New Rules for an Old Institution." Her first, "My Mother's Rules: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Emotional Genius" published in 2006, is a humorous memoir in which Judge Lynn recounts a childhood lived in the shadow of mental illness and provides a practical guide to the emotional lessons learned from that experience. And her time on the bench. Her second book, "Put It In Writing," coauthored with Deborah Hutchison, was published in September, 2009. It gives readers concrete, conflict-free solutions to the difficult situations that arise between family and friends.

Judge Toler has written for a variety of magazines including Divorce Magazine published through out the United States and Canada. In 2009, Judge Toler was given The Voice of Freedom Award by the Philadelphia Chapter of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joining former honorees Colin Powell and Vice President Al Gore, in ringing the Liberty Bell on Martin Luther King Day.

Currently, Judge Toler appears regularly as a guest expert on WeTV's Marriage Bootcamp. Born on October 25, 1959, she has been married to Eric Mumford since April, 1989. She has two sons and four stepsons.

Connect with Judge Lynn

Me By the Numbers Age: 56 Height: 5’1” Weight: 5 pounds more than I’d like. 10 pounds more than my mother would like. Kids: 6 (4 that came pre-assembled; 2 BigE and I made from scratch) Years on Divorce Court: 9 Years on the bench before Divorce Court: 8 Years Married: 27 Years Happily Married: less […]

“You’re 20! If I had 20 back oh, what a mess I’d make. 20 is for you. 20 is for growth. 20 is for the pursuit of a tomorrow that is better than today. 20 is for options. 20 is for passion and knowledge and enjoyment. It is not for continuous compromise. It is not […]

I know these things seem unrelated but I don’t believe they are. They, too, feel like intractable problems but I don’t believe that either. •A man climbs into his car with his estranged wife and their children and drives them all into a lake. •An eight-year-old boy is found hanging in his closet after being […]